Category Archives: Books

Recent readings, and some bold claims

I’ve read almost as many books in the first two months of 2012 as I did in all of 2011. That statement? Not literally true. Give me another two months. Then the numbers will add up. Granted, I don’t think I’ve picked up a single book with more than 300 pages in it since I [...]

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New video

I Am In Here from Darby Dixon III on Vimeo. Kinetic type interpretation of the opening paragraphs of the book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. For the tech interested: all the stop-motion marker-y and cut-out-y stuff was shot using Dragonframe; that footage was combined, sliced, and diced with the rest of the type in [...]

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It’s like that

Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought [...]

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Half-baked thoughts at the end of a twice-baked year

It’s been a weird year, you guys. From the long novel project to the sort of semi-ish still in process pop-novel project, which I don’t think I’ve gotten around to saying anything about anywhere, to the absurd PDF blog post, an effort that sort of cemented a lot of my thoughts and feelings about how [...]

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New Review at The Collagist

Well, new, last month, new, but, still, I really liked the books, so: I reviewed The American Girl and The Glitter Scene by Monika Fagerholm over at The Collagist. I’ll skip the teaser quote; let’s just say I profess my love for the books within the first paragraph. Read, read, read.

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The No Crumbs Project

First off: Maine? Bar Harbor? Acadia National Park? Love you guys. Love you. You’re beautiful. Next time, don’t let me leave. I mean it. Second off: as I mentioned somewhere in the depths of my previous post—I assume; I mean, I said, like, everything else in there, right?—I’ve been in the graphic design program at [...]

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I heard that blogging isn’t cool anymore which means now I can blog all the time again and say whatever I want and oh yeah I’ll still have the longest post titles in Litblogtown because I’ve got game, son, even when I’m not playing

Editor’s note: this post got away from us, slightly, and, therefore, is presented in two versions. The body text of the blog post is provided below. The (hopefully far more fun) version is available as a downloadable (and more or less printable PDF, at least, printable, if you skip the cover page, though, to be [...]

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Round table on Stone Arabia

Okay, so, okay: more stuff coming, but, and I’m way late on this, but: I took part semi-recently in a super cool round-table discussion of Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta, which is a pretty good book, and I think the conversation was pretty good, too, despite my being in it. It’s over at Reluctant Habits. [...]

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Spoiler alert: it’s really not all like that first chapter…

…our hero realizes (recognizes?) as he reads through the readable, though highly disorienting, second chapter. As Matthew Cheney put it, some time ago: I enjoyed much of The Recognitions on that first reading, but also knew that I was missing a lot, perhaps even 80% of what the book was up to. For one reason or [...]

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Smart people books aren’t just for smart people, or shouldn’t be, at least

“Something to keep in mind when you start reading, Gaddis considered this [The Recognitions] a comic novel. Don’t forget to laugh amidst all that erudition and fancy language.” – link Which: yes. Standard disclaimers and apologies aside about infrequent posting, etc etc etc, yadda yadda yadda, full time job, school, recent discovery that I’ve likely [...]

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  • Follow Elsewhere

  • Reviews Elsewhere

    In little to no particular order.

    • "Monika Fagerholm creates a dark, dramatic, and lyrical world, often insular, full of change and loss.... I fell in love with this world and these books; they are, for me, a fresh reminder of what story itself is about.." Reviewed at The Collagist.
    • "Joshua Mohr’s debut novel...is where Michael Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road." Reviewed at The Collagist.
    • "Fill your book with blatant, modern-day classic, critical thematic concerns and a reviewer ought to have no problem calling them out in an easily digested bullet-point format.... Except, this book hurt. And trying to find a way to talk about that without merely repeating over and over again that this book hurt presents a far greater challenge." Reviewed at The Collagist.
    • "Let me be completely transparent: with Lethem’s work, I approach it with expectations. I expect spice. In this case, I found the book flavorless and cold." Reviewed at Identity Theory.
    • "Consider the f-bomb: you can trace the trajectory of the story’s heart by the elegant deployment of that dexterous cuss word across the pages of...Laird Hunt’s latest (arguably best, unarguably most emotionally engaging) novel." Reviewed at Identity Theory.
    • This review includes footnotes. Reviewed at The Quarterly Conversation.
    • "It is a slippery novel. It will never lay still and compromising in your hands, but the harder you hold on to it, the harder it is to hold. In confounding, it rewards: to borrow a line from the book, 'It’s only a problem if you make it one.' Reviewed at The Collagist.